Comparing
forever vs. nodemon vs. pm2 vs. strong-pm

How are they different?

Here we compare between forever, nodemon, pm2 and strong-pm.
In this comparison we will focus on the latest versions
of those
packages.
The current versions are
forever 0.15.3, nodemon 1.15.1, pm2 2.10.1 and strong-pm 6.0.1.

forever,
A simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given node script runs continuously (i.e. forever).
It was authored
by
Charlie Robbins
on Dec, 2010.
nodemon,
Simple monitor script for use during development of a node.js app.
It was authored
by
Remy Sharp
on Feb, 2011.
pm2,
Production process manager for Node.JS applications with a built-in load balancer.
It was authored
by
Strzelewicz Alexandre
on Jun, 2013.
strong-pm,
StrongLoop Process Manager.
It was authored
by
[email protected]
on Jul, 2014.

When comparing those packages you notice that
pm2 is the more popular package today
(23,499
Stars on Github).forever
has been out there for longer (since 7 years ago), it also
nodemon
has less dependencies, more daily downloads, more weekly downloads, more monthly downloads, less open issues and less open pull requests.pm2
has more versions, more frequent updates, more stars on Github, more followers on Github and more forks.strong-pm
has a bigger community of maintainers.

In our review forever got 517,005 points, nodemon got 1,884,241 points, pm2 got 643,582 points and strong-pm got 9,078 points. The points are a summary of how big the community is and how well the package is maintained.

Lets dive deeper and have a look at some more details
on those packages.

Going into more detail

forever0.15.3

nodemon1.15.1

pm22.10.1

strong-pm6.0.1

description

A simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given node script runs continuously (i.e. forever)

Simple monitor script for use during development of a node.js app.

Production process manager for Node.JS applications with a built-in load balancer.